I didn't think I'd be reading The Girls by Emma Cline just yet. But I was still trying to avoid long novels (a by-product of reading the amazing yet long Too Like the Lightning), so I decided to skip The Fireman by Joe Hill, which in turn moved up The Girls in my reading list.
Evie is a middle aged woman who lives her life working one job after another. During a rare lull between jobs, she stays at a home of a friend, where a question posed by her friend's son about her past opens the floodgates to remember the summer of her 14th year. She recalls being a part of a group led by the charismatic Russell, who claims that he is teaching people to be free. But Evie is there, not just because of Russell and his teachings, but because of her connection with one of Russell's most loyal followers, Suzanne. What Evie doesn't know is that the group, which would later be identified as a cult, is about to take alarming measures to express the freedom Russell espouses.
This isn't usually my kind of reading material, but I promised myself to read more titles outside of the usual fantasy and sci-fi genre picks that I gravitate to. And there was something mysterious about The Girls and its premise -- of a girl drawn to join a cult -- that I felt would be interesting to read.
Given that it was largely touted as influenced by the Manson Family Murders, I half expected that it would chronicle the workings of a cult and the crime that they would commit. While it is partly that, The Girls is purely Evie's story. And even if she does join Russell's group for some time, it's not just for the reasons that you would expect.
There is an exactness to author Emma Cline's narrative telling... a penchant to give the readers minute details to everything that Evie observes in her daily life, both in the stifling structure she calls home, and in the freeing environment at the farm where Russell and his followers are staying. And in her descriptions, Cline isn't averse to describing the decay that sits alongside the beautiful, but does so with impeccable balance, that it isn't hard to understand why Evie chose the way she did in the story. That same exactness lends to a familiarity for female readers that speak of teenage insecurities and knowing that a measure of decisions made at that age are not always genuine or are driven by less than good intentions. This is an author who understands what it means to be a teenage girl in any decade, even if she did just paint a very vivid setting in the sixties.
Evie's narration also touches on gender roles, not just based on her own experiences but what she has observed in the other women of her life. Her best friend tries to play a part that would get the attention of an older boy. Her mother drastically changes her lifestyle after divorcing her father, but still desperately attempting to fit into the world of whoever she is dating at the time. And then, there are the girls who follow Russell, who espouses that in following him they are free, but, even as Evie stays with them, she is aware that they are also just following blindly according to the role that he has painted for them.
While Evie is capable of clarity when it comes to the truth, she is willing to skirt around it if it means staying close to Suzanne. I suppose that, in this, she is different because her main influence isn't Russell (though she isn't immune to his charms and his attempts to remove layers of her innocence) but another female character. Evie's later accounts of her life after joining the cult reveals that she only ever had romantic relationships with men, so her fascination with Suzanne was less borne out of attraction but more because being with the latter offers her freedom that she never experienced in her daily life prior to their meeting.
I marveled at Emma Cline's ability to paint a vivid picture of Evie's teenage experience and middle aged solitude. Yet, I found myself giving The Girls a decent three star rating in Goodreads. I wondered after why I didn't rate it higher because it was obviously well-written. It was not until I had a chance to reflect on my reading experience that I realized that, while it was easy to lose yourself in Evie's world then and now, I found the book to be predictable. The ultimate crime committed is already expected, but I felt that Evie's actions and how the story would take shape were easy for me to anticipate, resulting in a reading experience less rewarding than I thought it would be.
The Girls features an interesting premise, with a strong narrative voice. It's a great debut effort for Emma Cline, and, while it might not be perfect, it does make me look forward to the next story she puts to paper.
Happy reading!Labels: Books, Drama, Emma Cline, Fiction, Reading List, The Girls, Thriller
